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Sprawl
unlimited
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ADDIS
ABABA(November
19,2008) Kim Heacox, a travel writer to my knowledge,
tells this about a little known aspects of Americana: "It still
astounds me that in a nation so fiercely dedicated to capitalism and
consumption, we embrace another form of wealth-open space-where
every hour isn't rush our, where worries come not from bear markets,
but from bears.
It is still inspiring to recognize that we Americans, who can shape
any landscapes in the world, have the wisdom to leave a few alone,
so the land can shape us."
Good luck for them. Side by side with their mega-cities, spreading
suburbs, rising population and car numbers, insatiable hunger for
landfills, carbon emission and such, Americans have also world-beating
national parks and open spaces.
Of course the United States is a huge landmass, very many times bigger
than Ethiopia, for instance. But size alone is not solely determinant.
There are several countries both in Europe and Asia that have open
spaces as recreation disproportionately bigger to their sizes. It
is a matter of choice.
Granted, in the modern world of today, there seems to be almost unstoppable
spread of everything (parks maybe the one exception) everywhere. Airports
find it vital to expand to the adjacent land. Realtors seem to be
all the time guided by the dictum that if you build it they will
come.
The Olympic Games have to have new venues every four years and the
new venue better be bigger than the last one. The need for landfills
grows as consumption inevitably rises. Automobiles need more roads.
Infrastructure is unstoppable.
Sprawl unlimited varies from place to place and country to country.
Some love it green, and try to put a cap on sprawl. Others don't.
Those that don't might gain the entire world in the short run but
quite possibly lose their soul on the long haul.
It is certainly beyond the scope of this article to give a philosophical
exposition on open spaces and parks and their contributions to people's
psychic well-being. Perhaps a quotation from Mr.Haecox's article will
help: "It seems clear to me then, that every national park, is
here to overwhelm us, not for us to overwhelm it.
It is a place to recieve, not take ; a place that's here to test our
resourcefulness, but more so our reverence, where we wait our turn
in a kayak, a canyon, a choir of silent singing trees, branches dripping
in a storm, and find ourselves to content to be thirsty in the rain,
too at peace to want more". This sounds hardly attuned to America's
go-go capitalism, but not untrue.
It has been sometime now since sprawl unlimited in Ethiopia made its
mark. Look out your window towards Enteto Mountain to the east of
the capital. What you see is an urban in-your-face-sprawl.
Big shots with bags of money have built mansion-like houses there.
Anecdotes indicate that these people chose the mountain top for the
breeze or for the view, and not because they could not find good enough
land downtown. The forests of eucalyptus are disappearing. The outcome:
The rest of us are losing for good the green panorama of the Entoto.
Urban sprawl in Ethiopia is in my view even the easy part. More disastrous
is the sprawl in rural areas of the country. Fertile farmlands get
appropriated by small businesses whose sustainability is by no means
certain. Food is obviously today's oil. So why short-change prime
agricultural land.
Virgin forests get too easily converted to farmlands or other land
uses, as if the country has no need for forests. When we lose a swath
of forest, we may lament the lose of timber or even fuel wood in future,
but there can be no equal to the lose to the ecology of the land as
a consequence of deforestation.
Wetlands, pasturelands, river banks. The manner we handle them or
the relationship between them and us can be described with just one
word: adversarial. The die has been long cast. Either we win or they
win. We win of course. They have been vanquished. Some experts tell
us they are retrievable; but it will take real zeal and some luck.
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